Suzanne Vega:
It took a long time to learn how to perform. It took another 10 years until I would say I got better at it, and in fact, that’s a lifelong quest for me. How do you embody the feeling and perform it in front of an audience?
Curtis Fox:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be, who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, Suzanne Vega talks about her latest album and opens up about the doubts she had early in her career.
Suzanne Vega:
Finally, I’ve started to feel like I am a musician. It’s in my family.
Debbie Millman:
For over four decades, Suzanne Vega has been one of the most distinctive and quietly revolutionary voices in music. From her songs, Luka, which gave voice to the unspoken, to Tom’s Diner, which became a cultural touchstone and even the blueprint for the MP3. Her music has blended the intimate with the universal, a poet of observation and empathy. Suzanne Vega has continually reinvented her sound while staying true to her storytelling roots. With her new album, Flying with Angels, she once again captures the struggles and resilience of our times. Suzanne Vega, welcome to Design Matters.
Suzanne Vega:
Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
Suzanne. I read that you’ve been mistaken for Cynthia Nixon, Beth Orton, Isabella Rossellini, and Molly Ringwald. What do you make of that range of doppelgangers?
Suzanne Vega:
I don’t know. I guess I remind people of something or someone. I think I’m a little bit of a shapeshifter actually. I think it’s amusing.
Debbie Millman:
Do you enjoy that sort of chameleon quality?
Suzanne Vega:
Well, I’ve come to live with it. It took me a while to realize that was even happening. When I was in my 20’s and I started to do photo shoots, I realized that every photo looked different and I looked like a different woman in each photo. That is something I’ve never quite been able to figure out or to control is the whole issue of image. So I don’t bother with it anymore so much. I work on certain things, but most people know me by my name and my voice.
Debbie Millman:
You were born in Santa Monica, but moved to Spanish Harlem when you were two. There, you live with your parents, your mom and stepfather, and in a multicultural household, how did that shape your sense of identity as a child?
Suzanne Vega:
It confirmed the idea that I was a changeling, that I was mutable, that identity was mutable because I grew up close to my Puerto Rican relatives, to my grandmother, my aunt, my uncle, and spoke Spanish, had been to Puerto Rico, and then later on, I realized, well, my stepfather told me that I had a different father.
Debbie Millman:
And you were nine when that happened? I believe.
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah, I was nine, and so I thought I had my identity down, even though I was constantly getting feedback from kids in the neighborhood and other people who would see our family would look at me and go, “Okay, where did she come from?” Because in a sense, I was the red-haired stepchild. Literally, that kind of stood out in our family.
So I learned then that identity was something that could change, that could change overnight, and that ultimately I learned not to identify with cultural things like am I Puerto Rican? Am I white? That became something that could fall away, so I learned to define myself from the inside using other signifiers. Since I’m a changeling, I feel that I don’t need to mark myself in that way. I find a way to be myself without joining any particular group.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that you’ve always felt more of an observer than a participant, and do you trace that to your childhood in a household that was both nurturing and volatile?
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah, I’m sure some of it was, but some of it I think was also my nature. Over the years, I’ve come to wonder and probably believe that I probably am somewhat neurodivergent. Sometimes if you’re neurodivergent, you have a delay in emotional processing. So I think I have that, and so therefore, there are times where maybe something’s going on in the household and I have to respond.
So because I’m not fully emotionally invested in the moment, that comes later, it can be two days later, it can be a month later, it can be a year later. There’s a sense of delay where I process things. No matter what household I grew up in, I think I would still have a bit in that.
Debbie Millman:
It’s interesting. I wonder if that slight initial detachment is what has fueled some of your ways of communicating in other ways, whether it be performance or singing or acting or any of the other, certainly writing other things that you do.
Suzanne Vega:
Well, it’s interesting that you bring up acting because sometimes people are like, why would you write a one-woman show and perform it for an hour and 45 minutes? Are you expecting to get other roles or are you expecting to join the realm of great actresses? And I’m like, “No, no, none of that. I’m not trying to be the next Meryl Streep.”
This is more, it was more like an exercise for myself where I could practice feeling things in the moment and doing it over and over again so that I could practice, here’s where I feel sad, here’s where I feel happy, here’s where I feel the sadness of someone’s death. It was for myself almost as an exercise, how to connect myself with my feelings.
So that’s why I enjoy acting so much, and I’ve also enjoyed dancing for similar thing, different way of inhabiting your feelings, your body. So I do those things because I love to do them and it makes me better at feeling my feelings in the moment.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. You picked up a guitar at 11 years old and wrote your first songs when you were 14, and I believe that the first song you wrote was titled Brother Mine.
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
What inspired that particular song and what did you think of the song back then after you wrote it?
Suzanne Vega:
There were a couple of things that had inspired that song. It was based on my brother Matthew, who used to get into fights a lot, and so it was a song to reassure him that I still loved him even though he got into fights. What had inspired me was the fact that my father, my stepfather, Ed, had also written a song to Matthew based loosely on my blue-eyed son, “Where have you been? My blue-eyed son?”
So he took a bit of that form and wrote a song for Matthew, which I featured in, had my own little verse. So that was exciting, and I thought I too would write a song about Matthew, and I also loved the Judy Collins version of a song called Liverpool Lullaby, which I’d never heard a song like that. It was so beautiful and so real. The verse says, “Oh, you are a mucky kid, dirty as a dustbin lid.”
When he finds out the things you did, you’ll get a belt from your dad. So I thought I’d never heard a song that was so blunt and the way Judy Collins did. It was just shimmeringly beautiful and sad. So that was my template. I thought, I want to write a song about my brother, and I liked it. It took me three years to write a song I thought was good enough to keep, because I had tried for three years.
I thought it was never going to happen from the years from 11 to 14. That was almost a quarter of my life spent trying to write songs. So I thought I was actually really bad at it, but then I wrote that one and I thought, “Oh, that’s not bad. Let me try another one.” And then I wrote The Silver Lady, and then I thought, “Oh, I might be pretty good at this.”
Debbie Millman:
I have spent two decades now talking to artists of every ilk, and I always feel compelled to ask musicians and songwriters how they go about writing a song. Where does that come from? It’s one of the artistic forms I feel is so mysterious and magical as somebody that’s done a lot of writing. As somebody that’s done a lot of illustrating, I understand where both the motivation and the muse comes from, but with songwriting, it’s a mystery and I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about how a song comes to you.
Suzanne Vega:
Well, what you said is exactly right, it’s a mystery, it comes to you and you have to set up the right atmosphere. You have to invite it in without being too obvious. You have to seduce the song. You have to make it comfortable so it can come to you and then present itself to you. If you’re too obvious about it just goes somewhere else. So it took a while to realize that. That said, I think I’ve written a song at this point in my life in every way that there is to write a song.
So if it’s not coming to you and you’ve made it soft and comfy and given it special lighting and its favorite treats and everything, and it’s still not coming, then it’s time to hit the thesaurus and the rhyming dictionary and you just sit down and work on it like it’s a crossword puzzle and just nail the thing. Sometimes it has to be that way, but there is a sense of calling something forth, prayer almost in a really good song, and the best ones are when it starts to happen by itself, the language starts to rhyme and you get these rhythms and the melody shapes itself. Those are really wonderful moments.
Debbie Millman:
A couple of years after you wrote Brother Mine, the bass player Richard Davis heard the song and told you that structurally and formally, it was really good, and you’ve since included it on your 2012 album, Close-Up Vol. 4, Songs of Family. How do you view that song now? Do you see it in a different light knowing that you wrote it when you were 14? It is a good song.
Suzanne Vega:
Thank you. I think it’s an anomaly for me, A, because it’s a country song, and it really does have a sort of (singing). Major key, very country, which was, I was exploring that genre when I was about 14. I had been looking at not just country, but real folk, Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston songs about traveling on the train, this kind of thing. So it’s an anomaly because of that, but I like it. I like it because of that, and I like it because it has a kind of earnestness and it’s kind of funny, and I think that in the end, Richard Davis was correct.
It does have a good form, and there is some things about the songwriting that is somewhat sophisticated. Someone pointed out that I draw this picture of my brother very clearly for an audience, which I would’ve had to have thought about that because I already knew him, so I didn’t have to do that, but I did. So I made it clear to an audience what I saw in my brother and what he was like so that they could understand it, and I thought, “Oh, that’s well-spotted.”
Debbie Millman:
That’s really well-spotted, and it’s given me a better understanding of why it’s so much harder for me to interview people I know well because it’s much harder for me to paint a picture. It just occurred to me. I’ve always wondered why is it so much harder?
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
I understand. Your first performance as a singer was actually with Pete Seeger at Carnegie Hall?
Suzanne Vega:
Yes. Oh, what a thrill that was. Yeah. He came to my school looking for children to sit at his feet. He was doing a benefit for a couple of progressive schools in New York City, and I was determined to get him to notice me, and I stood very close to him and sang as loudly as I could, which I don’t know how loud that was, but I sang Guantanamera in his face practically, and he chose me and he chose everybody else on the stoop also.
So we all were there at his feet and I loved it. I just remember the vast space of Carnegie Hall and the Applause and Pete Seeger, who we knew, he knew his music growing up. So it was a splendid moment, and I think I resolved that was probably one of the moments I resolved to not let go of that stage.
Debbie Millman:
By the time you were 16, you had written around 50 songs, yet at that point, your heart was set on being a dancer, and that’s what you studied at LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts. Why did you choose dance over music at that time?
Suzanne Vega:
Well, actually, I’ll share a secret with you. When the music department teachers found out that I wrote songs because I was always dragging the guitar around and playing at lunchtime, I played a few of my songs for Mr. Trevor, who was the head of the music department, and he said, “Why don’t you have a double major? Come on over to the music department.” I lasted about a month. I was not suited to learning music theory.
All my buddies were in the music department, and all the boys I liked were in the music department, so I would’ve loved to have stayed there, but I just sort of crept quietly back to the dance department once I realized I could not learn the things they were trying to teach me. That became apparent very quickly, and I think in the course of my life, I’ve tried six or seven times to learn music theory, and the last time I tried it, I was 27 years old, I’d already sold 4 million albums, and I thought, I am just going to farm this out to other people because there’s no point in my trying to learn it formally at this point.
Debbie Millman:
I read that for most of your life, you didn’t consider yourself a real musician because you never were able to read music.
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Is that still how you feel? Is it possible? Because now it’s like 10 million albums or something like that.
Suzanne Vega:
My vision of that changed when I met my birth father. I met my birth father at the age of 28 after I’d had this big success, and he sent me all these photographs of his mother and father who he had not known. It turns out my grandmother was a drummer and spent a lot of her time on tour, and my grandfather was a trumpet player and they had four children, and they gave up my father for adoption, so he never knew them, and I didn’t know my dad.
So suddenly I realized that this was a family, and many of them played music and could not play technically, they learned by ear like I did. Some of the other cousins that I’ve met are gifted both ways. They can play and they can read, but not me, and not my dad. So I thought, “Oh, this makes sense. Finally, I started to feel like I am a musician. It’s in my family. I come from a family of musicians.” But there’s some kind of dyslexia there where you feel it, but can’t read it.
Debbie Millman:
So at this point, you are 16 or so. You don’t know about your musical inheritance and you’re considering becoming a dancer, but I read that you got pushed out of the dance department because your teachers told you that you thought too much to be a really good dancer, and I’d never heard that before. What does that mean to be too much of a thinker to be a dancer?
Suzanne Vega:
Well, that goes back to the neurodivergent delay in processing feelings because, and it wasn’t that I was pushed out of the dance department, it’s that when I graduated, I asked my teachers, where should I go? Where should I apply? Because I wanted to stay in New York. I wasn’t sure if I should be a dancer or a songwriter. And so they suggested to me two places.
One was NYU Dance Department, which I applied there, and the other one was Barnard College. So I thought, “Well, if I’ll apply for both.” And I got into both, so there I had to make my choice, am I going to be a dancer or am I going to go to Barnard College, be a scholar? I wasn’t sure about the songwriting thing because I think they may have said I didn’t have the temperament for a performer.
So I was feeling doubtful. But it’s because a great performer really can embody the emotion in the moment, and you shouldn’t see the counting that goes on the one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, that’s not interesting to look at for an audience member. So it took a long time to learn how to perform for me. It took another 10 years until I would say I got better at it, and in fact, that’s a lifelong quest for me. How do you embody the feeling and perform it in front of an audience?
Debbie Millman:
When you went to college, you majored in English literature and you studied writers like Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, James Joyce, Carson McCullers. What motivated that decision? I also read how when you were very young, you saw a stage with an empty spotlight and remembered being attracted to that space. And so as somebody that was pulled towards performance, whether it be songwriting or dancing or anything, that was sort of motivating your body to move through music or with music, it was really surprising to me to read that you were considering becoming a scholar.
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah, I decided to go to Barnard and everybody had always told me how smart I was, and I loved to read, so that was a no-brainer. So for the first year or two, I worked in the library. I had scholarships, work study and loans, but I had to find a place to work on campus. So after a while, I think I got in trouble in the library for sitting and reading the books instead of putting them back on the shelves since that was becoming a problem.
So I went to look for a work steady job, and I saw that there was an opening in the theater, and I was afraid of the theater because that represented everything I seem to be bad at. But I thought, “Well, they need someone to run their costume department, and I love costumes.” So I thought, I just went for the interview because why not? They said, “Could I sew?” And I said, “I knew how to do hems and I could sew buttons.” And they said, “Great, you’re hired.”
So I got into this world of the theater, and that’s what I minored in theater in college. So even though I had this major with English literature, I got very caught up in the theater world there and started by doing the tech work of the wardrobe and then slowly started to put my big toe into the waters of actual performing and figuring out how do you do this?
Debbie Millman:
If you can talk about how your drama teacher Shirley Kaplan helped you break out of your shell. I love that story. I think my listeners would love it too.
Suzanne Vega:
Well, I’d heard about Shirley Kaplan and she had this special class called the Musical Ensemble Theater, and she was supposed to be really good at bringing people out of themselves, bringing people out of their shells, and I remember thinking, “No way, she’s not getting me out of my shell.” And she told me later, years later that she felt the same way.
When she saw me, she said, “There’s no way I’m getting in there.” But she still accepted me for her class, and I found to my surprise that she did, she managed to get through all of these neurodivergent ways of being and thinking by throwing things at me while I was singing. Not hard things, but like a ball or an apple, or she’d make me run around the room while singing something, which that feels so weird. When you first do it, you feel like an idiot, and so you start to laugh and then the class laughs with you and then you feel free.
So she did that kind of thing, or she kept me out of my head as she put it. One day I sang, I think It’s Going To Rain Today by Randy Newman, and she made me get dressed. She made me put on a scarf as though I were singing it into a mirror, and it was wonderful because it really did make you drop all of your self-consciousness and you had to respond. If she threw something at you, you had to catch it and then throw it back, so you had to interact, and it did wonders for my confidence.
Debbie Millman:
Is that what helped fuel your confidence to go out and start performing in some of the New York City cabarets and become part of the Greenwich Village Songwriters Exchange?
Suzanne Vega:
Eventually I did, but at first, all I had the courage to do was audition for the Ferdinand Folk Festival. Ferdinand was one of the dorms on campus in Columbia. I tried there and I sang three or four songs and everybody talked about it all year. So then I sang the year following, and then I started to get a little following of people who liked my songs, but I also performed in Shirley Kaplan’s cabaret. She had a little performing group that she would take us around and we would perform different places and do our songs, and that was also a great source of confidence for me, and I started to make my way down to the village and eventually made my way to Folk City.
Debbie Millman:
By the time you were 20, you had a lot of songs. You developed a style you did feel was your own. What made you decide at that point you were ready to go out and maybe become a professional musician?
Suzanne Vega:
First of all, I never really stopped. There was that first when I was at Barnard where I had started going down to The Village when I was 16, I had heard that you start by going to The Bitter End and you work your way up to Folk City, and then maybe if you’re really good, you could play the bottom line. So I took it very literally. So I was like, “First, I’m going to play at The Bitter End.” So I went there for two years on Monday nights, performed for the guy who always eat his dinner. He always said the same thing.
Debbie Millman:
What did he say?
Suzanne Vega:
He said, “You’re too quiet. You don’t have any stage presence. Your songs are pretty good. They’re almost like poetry.” He would say this with a look that implied that this was nonsense. But he’s like, “If you can write that stuff, you can write real songs.” So he kept telling me I needed more experience, and finally it occurred to me to stop going there and go somewhere else. So I think I was 16, 17, 18 when I was going to The Bitter End and getting rejected. I still have never played The Bitter End.
Debbie Millman:
I read that. It’s hard for me to believe.
Suzanne Vega:
Oh, well.
Debbie Millman:
“Bitter End, what are you thinking?”
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah. But then I had a year of the musical ensemble theater class, and then by the time I was 20, I think that’s when I went to Folk City for the first time, and I managed to bring 30 people down as part of my audience on a Sunday afternoon for Folk City, and they were impressed by that. So they booked me.
Debbie Millman:
You were rejected by every major record label, including A&M twice before they eventually signed you. I believe that in one of the rejection letters they sent you, it stated, Suzanne Vega has no sense of melody.
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah. Well, we had started that demo tape with cracking because I felt this was a signature song. I felt it was very modern. I felt that it was very rock and roll. It was related tangentially to this hip hop stuff that was coming up, and also felt like Lou Reed to me. So I felt like this was going to really show everybody how cool I was and how different I was than all the other folk singers, and then we got this rejection letter.
I was like, “Okay.” But in the end, I still feel that it was the right way to present the songs. And of course, if you listen to other songs, Tom’s Diner, that’s a melody that sticks in everyone’s head. So I eventually made peace with the guy who wrote that letter. He was my A&R guy at A&M for years.
Debbie Millman:
If you were rejected twice and then finally accepted, that means you were trying three times?
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah, we kept submitting demo tapes, and we were on the verge of signing a what’s called a development deal. They were going to give us a small amount of money so that we could develop a demo tape that they might like, and I think it was Nancy Jeffries who was piloting that project, and she brought Lenny Kaye onto the scene to see whether that would sort of change things up a little bit. And just as all of that was going on, I got a really good review in The New York Times, and that brought David Geffen in. So then there became a bidding war, and then I signed an actual deal with Anna.
Debbie Millman:
What did that rejection at that time, did it give you a different perspective on people not accepting you and then accepting you?
Suzanne Vega:
I never took the rejections personally, and since I’d already been rejected for two years by The Bitter End, it was just like, “That’s the game. They say, no, you say yes. If the door is closed, go around. If you’re standing there pounding on the door and it doesn’t open, go to a different one.” So I never thought, “Oh, everybody hates me.” I was like, “No.”
I had a lot of confidence in myself and in my vision, and if one person said to me, “Your lyrics really touched me.” Or, “Your lyrics really mean a lot to me.” That would be enough to keep me going to write another song every few weeks. I thought, “If they don’t like the music, it’s because of the neurodivergent thing. They maybe they don’t understand what the point of view is here, what the perspective is.” But again, I didn’t take it personally.
And Ron and Steve Addabbo were great to work with. Ron Fierstein, and Steve Addabbo, they were a great team to work with. Steve taught me in a sense how to sing by throwing me back into the studio and continuing to sing. He could be very critical, and I would complain a lot, but eventually, I learned my craft through working with them.
Debbie Millman:
Let’s talk about your first album. I have to share that back in the summer of 1985, when it first came out, I first saw posters of the album cover that were wheat pasted all over Manhattan, and I was working in a really seedy neighborhood in Hell’s Kitchen. I was working as a receptionist for a nutritionist and was trying to figure out what my whole life was going to be that summer, and I saw the poster and I was mesmerized, and I bought the album based on the poster, and it was all I listened to for the rest of the year.
I could recite that entire album word for word still 40 years later. I have the original vinyl, I bought it again on CD, now I have it all on the MP3s along with Joni Mitchell’s Blue and Rickie Lee Jones first album. These are formative albums to my life. My younger self is thanking you right now for making it, because it did help me through a lot really hard times.
Suzanne Vega:
That’s so great. Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
Now, is it true that you sang Undertow one of the songs on that album at your sister’s wedding?
Suzanne Vega:
She asked me to, yeah, I thought, “Sure.” She liked it. I liked it.
Debbie Millman:
The first two lines of the song, I believe right now, if I could, “I would swallow you whole. I would leave only bones in teeth. I would see what was underneath.” And that’s not anything that’s written in front of me, how well I know it.
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
I didn’t think the song had any lascivious undertones at that time, but did anybody else at the wedding wonder?
Suzanne Vega:
Well, I don’t know if anyone else at the wedding wondered, but my brother thought it was weird, and he told me so because he had assumed that it was a song about oral sex, because of course, he was a young man, and that was very much on his mind. But I thought of it as more of a spiritual taking in and stripping someone clean. And interestingly, I was dating the man then who is now my husband.
So I had written it for Paul, and I remember singing it for him, and he said, “That’s one of your most beautiful songs.” And he said, “But I would be free, but I would also be dead.” That was his comment. We never talked about it again. So I was like, “Okay.” So yeah, it was a song that could be interpreted in many ways, but I think the opening line prevented it from being a single. At one point, we were playing with the idea of sending it to radio, and I think it was rejected for that might be considered lascivious, which now is it wouldn’t even, exactly. Yeah, exactly. It wouldn’t even-
Debbie Millman:
Interestingly, it’s so melodic. It’s so crazy to me to think that somebody would’ve said that you weren’t melodic, but songs like Freeze Tag and Cracking, Marlene on the Wall, Small Blue Thing, one of my all-time favorites, they were so sophisticated for someone so young and really did immediately establish you as a singer-songwriter who actually created stories in her songs. When did you begin to feel that you had a distinctive voice of your own rather than echoing your influences? I know you felt like you had established your style earlier, but to have a distinctive voice so young is really rare.
Suzanne Vega:
I realize that now, but back then, I didn’t feel young. As I said, it took me three years to write my first song from 11 to 14. So I felt like I’d been working constantly and slowly for all these years. I had made a decision that I wanted to get a record deal. I made that decision when I was 16, and it took me eight years to get that record deal. So there were times where I thought, “Is this going so slowly? This is never going to happen.”
But by the time I did get the record deal and it came out, there was this huge acceptance and my life changed pretty radically almost overnight, but it’s because I’d been working so hard all those years before I felt that the first songs were strong. When I wrote Gypsy, I remember thinking that that was a good song. I worried that it was corny and sentimental, and I rewrote the whole thing to be less corny and sentimental. And a friend of mine said, “I think it was fine the first way you did it.”
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I love that song. I was wondering when you said that if current version is the original version version for that one.
Suzanne Vega:
It’s the original version. Yeah, it’s the original version. I have another version somewhere, which I should probably put as a B-side somewhere. So I remember thinking that that was good. That was influenced a bit by Leonard Cohen, but maybe by somebody else, maybe John Prine or because I listened to those writers also. But when I saw Lou Reed, then normally I hated rock and roll. I thought it was a bunch of posers standing around in costumes doing stupid stuff and posing. So I wasn’t really into it, but someone took me to see Lou Reed, and I hated the first half of the show. I thought-
Debbie Millman:
Why?
Suzanne Vega:
He’s doing that stupid posing thing. Shouting at the audience, lighting cigarettes and throwing them at the audience, bashing his equipment, singing things I thought were offensive. I can’t remember what, Heroin probably, which I didn’t think was cool. I’d come from East Harlem, which had a heroin epidemic, and I was like, “This is gross.” But the second half of the show was all this music.
He sang a song called Caroline Says Part Two, and I just was so taken with that song and I thought, because I heard the lyrics, I heard them clearly. I realized he was writing in a female voice, even though he was male, obviously. It was like a bit of fiction, and that I suddenly had this awakening and I became obsessed with Lou Reed, and I felt that’s when I started to write Cracking and some of the other songs that had more edge and definitely that moment influenced when I wrote Luka.
Debbie Millman:
I was going to ask, yeah. For listeners that might not be aware of the song Caroline Says is a song about a woman being abused, physically abused.
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
So let’s talk about Luka, your second album. Solitude Standing was massively successful. It featured two global hits, Luka and Tom’s Diner, both of which are still songs that have stood the test of time, but they’ve also been massively reproduced by others, particularly Tom’s Diner, which I think has been covered about 30 times and sampled. Last I read was 155 times. 155 samples.
Suzanne Vega:
I think the doorman looked it up from where I’m living now, and he says it’s up to 187.
Debbie Millman:
My numbers are wrong.
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah, because maybe there’s been a month or two maybe since you looked it up. It’s constant.
Debbie Millman:
I’ve been working on the prep for a while.
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
But Luka was an unlikely pop hit. It’s actually a devastating song from the perspective of a young boy, and I read that you wrote it before your first album came out, before you even had a record deal. What made you decide to release it on your second album?
Suzanne Vega:
I had a vision of what I wanted the first album to be like, and the first album is that album. I wanted the songs to be modern. That’s why I started with Cracking, and that’s why we have Neighborhood Girls, but I also included the Queen and the Soldier because it felt folky to me so I could still retain that folk root. So I felt that Luka was not, I was not ready to sing that song in public. My manager picked that song out when he first heard it, he said, “I think that song could be a hit.” And I was like, “What?”
Debbie Millman:
A song about child abuse?
Suzanne Vega:
A song about child abuse because no one seemed to. It was a song that people didn’t understand, and if they did, then they looked sad and they looked embarrassed, and it was a song nobody asked for. Once in a while I’d get a comment like, “Oh, that’s a very interesting song. You’ve really given that child a voice.” But most people were like, “Oh my God, please stop.” And this was in the era of punk and New Wave. So the subject matter was supposed to be as edgy as possible. That’s partly why I wrote it, but I almost felt like I’d almost gone too far.
So to have my manager say, this is a song about an issue, and they took the two years in between the first album and the second album to work on the production, and it took that long to get it just right, so it would go to radio and fit right in, and that’s what happened. They worked on the drum track, they worked on the rhythm track, they worked on. We had the keyboard part by Anton Sanko that had that great opening line. His keyboard part went (singing). Then my guitar came in. So all of this came together to make the sound that would fit in with radio.
Debbie Millman:
You took the name Luka from a boy that lived in your building, but many years after the song came out, you stated, “I am Luka.”
Suzanne Vega:
Yes. Many years. Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
What was that like for you to share that?
Suzanne Vega:
No matter how many years go by, I still feel a sense of, I don’t know how to describe it, really. A bit of fear, a bit of exposure. There’s a reason I’ve made it almost like a puppet. Luka was sort of my puppet. I used to make puppet shows for my brothers and sisters when I was to entertain them, and I liked to use the third person, which I did in the songs often. It made me feel safe.
I don’t normally like confessional songwriting, but when I said that, I thought, “Well, what prompted it really was the feeling over time and over decades that …” Because in the beginning I used to say, it doesn’t matter if it happened to me. It only matters that it happened. It only matters that it’s true. If people would say, “Is this a true song?” I’d say, “Oh, yes.” Because it is. And I knew it was true because I got so much feedback from all these people all around the world, all ages, male, female, didn’t matter.
So that to me, especially in the beginning, I felt that was the important thing was that as a true song, it doesn’t matter if it happened to me. But then over time, I felt, even though I never lied, I started to feel that it was a burden that I wasn’t being truthful. And so I started to feel that when people asked directly as they started to do over time, that it was important to just say it simply.
Debbie Millman:
After Solitude Standing, you began to move away from your acoustic roots to more electronic industrial sounds with albums like 99.9F. And at the time, the song Blood Makes Noise felt so radically different from your previous music. And I can imagine that given the global success of your first two albums, your record company must have been like, “Okay, just keep doing that.” But immediately you pivoted and started to evolve. Did that feel liberating or terrifying?
Suzanne Vega:
It was very liberating. I loved it. And it was my working with Mitchell Froom that made that all come to life. I felt like I’d been drawing with pastels and doing pencil drawings and suddenly was allowed to play with the big fat crayons. I was like, “This is awesome. It was way more than I had imagined.” And Mitchell set up an atmosphere where we both felt very free to have ideas, throw them out, do whatever we wanted, amuse ourselves, amuse each other. If I said, “Oh, I hate that.” Or, “What are you thinking?” He would just toss that idea out and bring in another idea. So it was a very fertile wild time, and it felt very liberating.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve had a long fascination with the writer, Carson McCullers that has spanned decades. It inspired your play. Carson McCullers talks about love and the album Lover, Beloved songs from an evening with Carson McCullers. And I understand you’ve been intrigued by McCullers ever since college. When you read her short story Sucker, when actually that was when you were a teenager. I went and read it to get a sense of what that inspiration was, and oh my God, is that a brutal story? It’s a brutal story.
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah, it’s a brutal story.
Debbie Millman:
And also written from the first person in another voice.
Suzanne Vega:
In another voice.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah.
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah. She writes it from a boy’s perspective.
Debbie Millman:
A young boy?
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah, and the language is really tough. And just the title itself Sucker. I remember thinking, “Wow, who is this guy?” And I read it in the ’70s. So it sort of fit in with this sort of tough mood that New York was in that we were all in back in 1972, ’73. So I was shocked to find out this was a song that was written in the 1950s by a girl, by a young woman. I thought, “Wow.”
And so I wanted to get closer to this and find out who did this. And then I became her as a game because Shirley had said, “Come in dressed as a character. Come in dressed as a person in the arts who lived, but who’s no longer alive and be ready to field questions as though you’re on TV.” And so I chose her, and that was big fun. So it’s something I return to over and over again.
Debbie Millman:
Do you see your theatrical performance work as a continuation of your songwriting voice? You mentioned before that it’s still very much about perspective and voice, and I’m wondering if that includes your songwriting voice.
Suzanne Vega:
Maybe. I think that I’m always working on my performance. I’ve trained in so many different techniques. I haven’t always mastered them. In fact, I don’t think I’ve mastered any, but I still train myself in them because I want to be a better performer because I want to earn that spotlight. So that’s why I’ve studied dance, and I’ve tried to study music and I’ve studied singing and I’ve studied theater.
So this playing, playing with the play has been a way of exploring, first of all, what’s it like to inhabit someone else’s body language, preoccupations, their life view and get their feelings across? And how do you do that well? And how do you express the range of their feelings in the moment? That’s what it always comes down to. How do you do this in the moment? So it lives in the moment. So in a sense, I’ve used her life and her character and her work as a way of expressing and exploring the world of feelings and emotions, and I feel that it has helped me in a way to connect with my own emotions.
Debbie Millman:
Do you think that McCullar’s sense of dual nature mirrors some of your own?
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah, because as we discussed before, I feel like a changeling, and that means that sometimes I inhabit a male voice or I inhabit a female voice, or even the way I look physically. Most of the time I have red hair, but sometimes it’s blonde or sometimes it’s darker, sometimes short, long, whatever. So there’s a sense of mutability that is also kind of edgy. Mostly I fell in love with her character, her paradoxes. She could be so empathetic in her work and so mean to her husband.
Debbie Millman:
Catty and catty.
Suzanne Vega:
Catty and bitchy and mean.
Debbie Millman:
Kind of love that.
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah, and needy. And she could be wildly independent and really intelligent and just standing up for other people’s rights, but this needy neediness and needing the love and needing warmth and affection to the point where she would drive people away because there was this grotesque thing that would come out with her, which was, I think that’s exciting for a woman to be able to be grotesque in public, and that’s what she could be. It was startling to think that she was so famous in 1940 way ahead of her time.
Debbie Millman:
Suzanne, before we talk about your most recent album, Flying With Angels, I want to ask you about some themes that I’ve heard in your music over the decades, and one is the concept of cold. These are just a few of the lines that appear in your songs over the decades. In Small Blue Thing, you say, “I am cold against your skin, and it makes me wonder, you say to that cold blue flame that you are under.” In Straight Lines, you say, “There’s a sound across the alley of cold, metal touching skin.”
In Solitude Standing you say, “By her long, cool stare and her silence.” In Golden, “You say You are shining like the sun upon a cold gray sea.” In Zephyr & I, you stayed, “In spring, the tide and riverside will wash away the cold and frozen.” In 99.9F, you say, “Something cool against the skin is what you could be.” In Cracking, “Soon it will hit the deep freeze.” In Freeze Tag, “Tickling and trembling a freeze tag in the dark.” And in your new album in which you state, “And I feel the air become bone cold.” So talk about the use of cold as a theme in your music.
Suzanne Vega:
Well, as you said that my hair is standing up on end with goosebumps, I suddenly got a shiver listening to all of that cold imagery. I was like, “Ooh, I need a sweater.” Yeah, it’s one of the polarities of life is the cold, hot spectrum. And I run on the colder side of things to the point where my manager teases me about it and says, I have ice in my veins, which is, I think he’s overdoing it, but it must come off that way.
To be cool is sinister. It can be cool in the way we use the vernacular, but it’s also bad. It’s evil. It’s lifeless. It has its own allure because of this, and the world of heat was something I didn’t really identify with. Say my brother Tim, for example, hot-blooded, sweating all the time, very connected to his emotions, and we really were a good team because we ran that gamut. He embodied just heat and passion, and I’m on that other end of that spectrum by nature, I don’t know why.
Debbie Millman:
The New York Times described you as a clinically poetic observer, and that felt like it was picking up on the coldness. I don’t know, I was struck by the use of cold on your first album Cracking and Freeze Tag, but I’ve always felt your work to be more intimate than cold.
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah, because there’s all these other elements. My voice is very intimate. Some of the recordings sound like I’m whispering into your ear. So there’s a warmth there. There’s a kind of-
Debbie Millman:
Exactly.
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah, there’s a warmth and an informality to elements of the way I perform, but I still like to have … I’m more formal than not. My daughter points out that of myself and my husband, he’s informal, I’m more formal. I prefer a bit of formal. So we’re not all over the place. It doesn’t mean I’m always that way, but yeah, that’s how I run.
Debbie Millman:
Your most recent album, Flying With Angels has been considered one of your finest, and it really is extraordinary. It has both some of the classic Suzanne Vega gems, but also the innovative take you to new places, places, spaces. You stated that the album lives in an atmosphere of struggle, and clearly we are living in a time of deep despair, dismay, and struggle. What struggle did you most want to illuminate given how there seem to be right now?
Suzanne Vega:
The first one I was thinking of course, was the COVID years, because that’s where I feel the genesis of this album came from like 2020, because really in 2019 I was thinking, “Ah, let’s start working on a new album.” And then we turned in phase 2020 and ran into this wall called COVID. I’d never experienced anything like that in my lifetime where we all had to stay home for two years. And here in New York, it was this very frightening, sterile atmosphere. Everybody left. I stayed with my husband, and then you’d hear the ambulances go by and we were all trying to read as much news as we possibly could. So a lot of the songs, Rats comes from that moment.
Mariupol comes from that moment in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine. Some of the imagery from which they were living in a state of permanent emergency comes from COVID, but also comes from the aftermath of COVID because we had a bad situation in our house where my husband’s bout with COVID led to much worse, a much worse situation. And of course, then there’s been the two elections of Trump where Trump got in and then he got in again. All of this, I think, infiltrates the atmosphere of Flying with Angels. There are personal issues on the album. There are political issues on the album, there’s social issues on the album, and then there’s little bits of humor and-
Debbie Millman:
And beauty.
Suzanne Vega:
… And beauty, I would hope. And then also of a song like Love Thief. It sounds groovy and it sounds sexual, but on the other hand, also there’s a little element of politics because it’s about the ideology of love as opposed to the ideology of hatred, and that’s embedded in that little song which you can find if you probe.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I actually felt like if anybody was going to cover that song, it could be Adele.
Suzanne Vega:
I would love that. I would love that. Yes.
Debbie Millman:
It has a real ballad-y sort of R&B feel to it. Another of my favorites is Chambermaid, which is a real surprise and talk about storytelling through different voices. Chambermaid includes the melody of one of my favorite Dylan songs I Want You. And in that song he sings, “While I return to the Queen of Spades and talk with my chambermaid, she knows that I’m not afraid to look at her. She is good to me, and there’s nothing she doesn’t see. She knows where I’d like to be, but it doesn’t matter.”
The first stanza of your song is, “I’m the Great Man’s Chamber made. I’ve seen where his hallowed head is laid. I revere the places he has stayed and clean crumbs from his typewriter. He is good to me. There’s nothing he doesn’t see and he knows where I’d like to be, but it doesn’t matter.” What inspired this duality?
Suzanne Vega:
Oh, there’s a lot of theft going on here. I’ve always wondered about that Chambermaid and about his relationship with her. What is that? Is it sexual or, they’re just talking, or what is there? Does she clean his room all the time? What’s her point of view? I’m always curious to know the other point of view.
So I had been doing a lot of housekeeping, which is not my favorite thing, and struggling with my own songs, really running into some writer’s block with a couple of them. And I woke up one morning with a song, “I Want You in my Head.” And thinking, “I’m Bob Dylan’s Chambermaid.” And I thought, “That’s an interesting rabbit hole to go down.”
So I got out of bed and I came into this office here, and I thought about that for a minute. I got a little bit of butter on my computer because I’d made some toast with butter, and I thought, “Oh, butter on the computer. How can I use that on a song?” And suddenly I had a sense memory of crumbs on the typewriter. My dad was a writer and he would let me use his electric, and one year I was baking a lot and I must’ve gotten crumbs on the typewriter, and he made me come and clean it. So that popped up and the whole song seemed to write itself in about hour and a half.
Debbie Millman:
What was it like to write inside another artist’s universe?
Suzanne Vega:
I love it, and it’s so exciting to be there in Bob Dylan’s universe, which sometimes just to amuse myself, I will play his songs. I have a little Bob Dylan songbook. I like to sing his songs because then you inhabit them. I’ve done cover versions of It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding). And it’s an eight-minute song, and it careens everywhere, and he’s so relaxed in his language and he uses phrases, and some of them are off the cuff or they’re near rhymes, or they’re maybe not grammatically correct or whatever.
And it’s so opposite the way I work where I’m polishing every phrase and everything has to be just right. He’s so off the cuff that it’s a thrill to sing a song like that because you feel like you’re careening around these roads of his mind. You know you’re safe because you’ve heard the song, but when you sing it, you’re at the wheel of that car and you’re just careening, and it’s a thrill.
Debbie Millman:
Did you need to get Dylan’s permission to use the melody in your song?
Suzanne Vega:
I did.
Debbie Millman:
You toured with him in Norway in 2012.
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
So you knew him? You have inside track.
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah, and my manager knows his manager, and so I was thrilled to get the approval. He doesn’t own his publishing anymore, so we had to also go to the publishers and they approved it with certain caveats, and so it all worked out.
Debbie Millman:
You wrote a song titled Lucinda, which is for Lucinda Williams, and you write that you love her blunt and humble. It’s an interesting duality also.
Suzanne Vega:
Well, I think it’s very her. She has a kind of swagger about her, but she is also blunt and humble. She also struggles with that feeling of like, “Do I deserve this? Should I go to the Grammys? I don’t have anything to wear.” Those struggles that you feel when you grow up working class female itinerant, all of that comes out in her music. So she’s all these contradictions, which I like.
Debbie Millman:
You end the album with a song titled Galway, which feels very much one of the Suzanne Vega melodic gems. Talk about that song and that placement of that song.
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah, I had fun with the placement of that song because the way we originally structured everything was we started with all the folky stuff and then ended with all the really edgy stuff ending with rats. And we had Witch back there too, and that was too easy because that way people could have their easy listening side and then they could avoid all the difficult stuff later.
So I changed it all up, and I had the first three songs be about current events, and I put Witch third because I wanted people to understand that this was not going to be just an easy listening experience. So then I thought, “Oh, let’s end with Galway because it’s so funny and it’s kind of nostalgic.” And it’s kind of a relief after the noise of Rats.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I loved it. It felt like it came really full circle into bringing your entire catalog together,
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah, and it brings a smile, and people love the melody, and I wrote the chorus really quickly thinking, “Oh, I’ll go back and fix those lyrics.” But then when I went back, I was like, “Oh, it works.” It’s a look back, but it’s also a look forward. It’s a look back on something that happened. But Galway is this mystic place that seems to recede into the horizon and is still there waiting for me, for us. So it’s the past and the future.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, it felt like you were writing for a real person. So I can’t help but wonder if he’ll recognize himself in the song.
Suzanne Vega:
Well, we’ll find out. Sometimes it takes a while for the people to realize it. The guy who I wrote Caramel for, it took him years before he realized that he was that guy. So I don’t know, but we’ll have to catch up and I’ll have to let you know in about a year or two to see.
Debbie Millman:
Okay. Yeah. I know that Luka used to brag that you used his name in the song.
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah. He had some kind of ownership.
Debbie Millman:
Your daughter, Ruby Froom, sings on the album with you. What was that like?
Suzanne Vega:
Well, I love hearing her sing. She’s a terrific singer, and she went to the High School of Performing Arts and was a vocal major. I love it when she sings with me because she’s told me many times that she’s internalized my phrasing so she can match my phrasing perfectly. She really does it there, especially on Alley. That choral sound you hear in the back, all of that is Ruby.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, wow.
Suzanne Vega:
Yeah. There’s a lower male voice that’s Jerry, but the five or six harmony lines that you hear in the back that sound celestial, she’s doing all of that, and she did it herself and came in and she and Jerry worked on it, and she can just knock that stuff out, which I’m always amazed with. And she also does the vocals, the background vocals on Mariupol, the low voices and the high ones. So I love singing with her. I wish we could do it more often.
Debbie Millman:
Suzanne Vega, thank you for making so much work that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Suzanne Vega:
Thank you so much.
Debbie Millman:
Suzanne Vega’s latest album is titled Flying With Angels. She’s currently on tour. You can read all about that on her wonderful website, suzannevega.com. This is the 20th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening, and remember, we can talk about making a difference. We can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Curtis Fox:
Design Matters is produced by The TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.
